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I needed to amend some company bank details and my bank, Santander, insisted that I had to either post in the changes or send a fax. I haven’t seen a fax machine in years, however a quick tweet did point me towards two online services. HelloFax, a Y Combinator company, and eFax, a old-school looking service with the sort of design that makes you grimace.

Both companies offer a 30 day free trial. I’ll be honest, I was not intending using either service beyond this one fax.

I tried HelloFax first of all, but because I was faxing a 0800 number, HelloFax would not send the fax, which made them kinda useless. I then tried eFax and despite the fairly ugly user interface it did the job, and that’s what matters.

Whilst HelloFax have a free option, with multiple price tiers thereafter, eFax has one flat monthly subscription and requires you to enter your credit card at sign-up. *Warning bells*

Well yes I forgot to cancel the account before the 30 days free trial were up. Fair enough, I would pay their £7.50 monthly subscription for my one fax sent and cancel the account.

I could not find how to cancel the account from their fairly confusing UI, so I emailed their support to be told that I could only cancel the account by phoning customer support.*Warning bells again*

I haven’t phoned them yet. I don’t want to out of principle. If they can take my money online then they can cancel my account online. I don’t need them to “help me”. I think it was the credit score companies that used to be notorious for only allowing you to cancel your subscription to your personal credit reports by phoning them up, whereupon the customer service representative would try to persuade you that you really needed to pay £10/month to know your credit score at any time. Yeah right.

I then double-checked my bank account to see what they had charged me. Since starting my free trial on 26th March, I have been charged £7.38 on 28th March, refunded £7.38 on 3rd April, charged £7.38 on 17th April, and charged £16.61 on the 29th April. Quite how that equates to a 30-day free trial and a £7.50/month subscription I’m not sure.

Everybody wants to reduce customer churn as much as possible, but it should be achieved by having a great product and great incentives not to leave, not massive obstacles to prevent you leaving. I might very well have wanted to use eFax regularly in the future, since it does what it says it does – sends faxes – but after this experience I’d rather buy a fax machine (presuming they still exist).

As far as I can see, eFax’s Terms don’t even say that you have to phone them. Just that you have to contact a customer service representative. I’m pretty sure an email to customer service counts!

Give them their due, they’ve been quite responsive on Twitter and did apparently try to phone me today. Hopefully they’ll be able to sort this tomorrow without me having to ask my bank to start several chargebacks against them.

I’m not massively enamoured by the “Fax SaaS model”, so I wonder how eFax and HelloFax are doing. I guess they must be on to something if YC invested in them.

On the related topic of startup metrics, take a look at this beautiful metrics dashboard which works via integration with Stripe: https://buffer.baremetrics.io/dashboard Nice!

Update (2 May2014): I spoke to eFax customer support (calling from Ireland) and I have to admit the guy was quite helpful. There was (I think) some kind of error on my account because the number I had faxed was 0800 it was more expensive than their normal free trial allows. Hopefully the extra charges will be refunded soon. As expected they offered me a deal to stay with them longer, but it was not a hard sell and I actually agreed to it. Why not have a fax number for £3.50/month?! So… I still think it’s pretty cr@ppy to force customers to cancel on the phone in this day-and-age – they probably could have got the same effect with automated emails to entice me to stay, but on the other hand it worked for them. So the lesson is – remove your online cancellation button kids!

In the conversations around Scottish independence, Scotland often gets compared to Norway. This is mostly because of similar populations, comparable levels of gingerness, and of course the oil.

If Scotland did gain independence, we would never end up wildly oil-rich like the Norwegians, since we are clearly past “peak oil”. The general consensus seems to be that the reduction in “subsidy” from the UK government would be more or less offset by us taking 90% of the oil tax revenues, leaving us financially in a status quo. Gross over-simplification, but bare/bear* with me.

I prefer to look at another Scandinavian country for comparison – one which is similarly comparable population-wise, but doesn’t have the black-swan event of finding a trillion dollars worth of oil in the back garden: Denmark.

One question keeps creeping to to my mind when I casually make this comparison: why has Denmark (population ~5.6 Million) got so many globally recognised companies, compared to Scotland (population 5.3 Million)?

Try this exercise: name the top global Danish companies you can think of off the top of your head. Maybe you can’t name many, but you’d probably be surprised to discover how many companies you have heard of day-to-day are actually Danish. Then try the same with global Scottish companies. This is not meant to be an exhaustive review – rather an exercise in finding “global companies you have heard of.”

Novo Nordisk – known for diabetes treatments – employs 38,000 people around the world.

Genmab – admittedly not one most people would have heard of (I have because of my pharma/biotech background) – but it’s exactly the sort of mid-sized biotech company with promising drugs and partnerships that Scotland (actually the whole of the UK) is lacking.

Carlsberg – yes we all know the beer of questionable quality that the Danes pretend they hate to see leave, but it’s really a very big drinks company employing around 45,000 people worldwide.

Vestas – it’s the largest wind turbine company in the world, whose market share is apparently decreasing due to increased global competition (I’ll guess from China) but it’s still top dog, and the company that I (at least) hear most often in discussion about wind energy.

Clothing – maybe no mega giants, but I’m constantly surprised by the number of brands I know that turn out to be Danish. e.g. Hummel and Jack and Jones (part of a bigger group called Bestseller).

Internet companies – ok, they all seem to hot-foot it off to Silicon Valley as soon as they do well so they don’t really count, but quite a few decent tech companies started in Denmark – e.g. customer care darling, Zendesk. Podio was also born in Copenhagen, but sold out a couple of years ago.

Lego – coolest toy company in the world? ‘Nuff said!

Scotland

Have we got any global healthcare companies based in Scotland? The only one I could think or was ProStrakan, and they seem to have been acquired by a Japanese company since I last looked at them. I can’t think of any others.

Drinks companies – we used to have White & MacKay – it’s not really on Carlsberg’s scale, and it’s owned by United Breweries Group of India now anyway. I suppose we have Barr (they make Irn Bru don’t you know) but I don’t really think they are particularly global and they tried to sell themselves, sorry I mean merge, with Britvic recently anyway. We have lots of globally known whisky brands, but most of them are owned by non-Scottish parent companies.

Shipping – nope. I think we just desperately cling to making warships for the UK navy. No global players there.

Banking – well 10 years ago we could have pointed to Royal Bank of Scotland and Bank of Scotland with pride. Now they are an embarrassment. There are a few other big finance companies based in Scotland, such as Scottish Widows, but not exactly world-known companies. Ach crap, I just looked up Widows and even they are a subsidiary of Lloyds. Oh well.

Wind power – nope, none that I know of. We just beg for Vestas to come build something in Dundee.

Clothing – well I suppose we have tartan, and Harris tweed. Still, no global companies I can think of. A few globally known brands like Pringle and, uhhh, did I mention kilts are Scottish?

Oil stuff – ok we have Wood Group based in Aberdeen. They’re big (I think), but they don’t really have that “heard of globally” thing about them. Given how much oil we have in the backyard, it’s kinda surprising to me we didn’t end up with a really big oil company based in Scotland, the way Norway has Statoil.

Internet companies – actually, next time some d*ckhead tells you all Internet companies have to be based in London or they will die, ask them what the UK’s highest-valuation Internet company is. They’ll probably say Huddle, Mind Candy or Satago, but you can tell them about Skyscanner – based in Edinburgh. What – the not-that interesting fairly old flight comparison website that has presumably been killed by Expedia and Kayak? Yes – that one. It’s doing rather well in fact and recently took funding from Sequoia Capital, the most successful Internet company VC firm in the world, valuing it at $800 M – in fact it’s their only UK investment to date I think. I hope they don’t relocate to the States.

Lastly honourable mention for Rockstar Games – publisher of games such as Grand Theft Auto and based in Edinburgh (where they fled to after deciding they were too cool for Dundee, where they started). Nevertheless, they’re not really Scottish any more, having been bought by Take Two Interactive – a US company. Well, at least they still make games in Scotland.

So there we have it. Denmark has a ton of massive global companies and seems to really punch above its weight given the country’s size, whereas Scotland has a couple of finance companies that nearly destroyed the country’s economy, and a nice bus company.

So the question is – why? No time to speculate here, but it’s a subject I would love to study more if I had the time. Doubtless others have already tried, so if you know any references I should have a look at – please mention so in the comments. In the meantime, I blame London.

* I never know which one it is and I can’t be bothered looking it up any more.